Jorge Raúl Rivera
Jorge Raúl Rivera was a coffee farmer in Chalatenango, in the far north of El Salvador, who founded the farm Santa Rosa and replanted it with Pacamara for the explicit purpose of winning the Cup of Excellence. Santa Rosa went on to take first place at El Salvador’s national competition in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and first in its category again in 2025, always with the same variety and almost always honey processed (Alliance for Coffee Excellence, results pages cited below, all accessed 2026-07-23 and confirmed via WebFetch).
He did not see any of it. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence’s own farm-directory page for the winning 2017 lot states that Jorge Raul Rivera passed away in May 2013 — before the first win (ACE farm directory — Santa Rosa 2017, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). Every winning lot since has been entered under the family company J. Raul Rivera, S.A. de C.V., which is the name that appears in the official results tables — not his.
To verify
“Three-time Cup of Excellence winner” is a description of the farm, not the man. Every first-place lot listed below was entered by the company J. Raul Rivera, S.A. de C.V. and won after May 2013, the month ACE’s own farm page says Jorge Raúl Rivera died. ACE’s description of the 2017 lot credits the honey processing that produced the 2014 win to his son, and names a brother, José Roberto, as the co-planter of the Pacamara (ACE farm directory — Santa Rosa 2017, accessed 2026-07-23). No source consulted here names the son. Attributing the wins to Jorge Raúl personally — as trade write-ups and this note’s own research brief do — is a shorthand for the farm and the family, and this wiki does not treat it as fact. Nothing was found to corroborate the May 2013 death date outside ACE’s page, so a second source would be worth having.
Story
Starting a farm in a war
Rivera began growing coffee in northern Chalatenango in 1979, the year El Salvador’s civil war began, in a district ACE describes as severely affected by the fighting. He was, by ACE’s account, a university lecturer who taught coffee cultivation for about a decade and was among the first to establish coffee in the north of the department at all (ACE farm directory — Santa Rosa 2017, accessed 2026-07-23).
Santa Rosa itself came later and was not planted with coffee at first. ACE’s account: the land was bought undeveloped, carrying native pine; by the time access roads were in, world coffee prices had collapsed, so the brothers planted pine plantations instead. Coffee only went back in after they heard about the Cup of Excellence in 2002, and the Pacamara was planted under the pine shade — the timber crop became the shade canopy for the coffee (same source).
That is an unusually literal case of planting for a competition. Most farms enter the Cup of Excellence with what they already grow; Santa Rosa’s coffee block exists because of it.
What the Cup of Excellence record actually shows
The Cup of Excellence is a national competition run by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence: lots are cupped blind over several rounds, the winners are published with scores, and the whole set is sold in one public online auction. Every row below comes from ACE’s own published results.
| Year | Rank | Farm | Score | Process | Lot size | Price/lb | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 1 | Santa Rosa Chalatenango Lote 2 | 91.41 | Honey | — | — | — |
| 2017 | 1a | Santa Rosa | 91.28 | Honey | 330.65 lb | $95.70 | $31,643.20 |
| 2017 | 1b | Santa Rosa | 91.28 | Honey | 374.35 lb | $95.50 | $35,750.42 |
| 2019 | 1a | Santa Rosa | 90.57 | Honey | 341.69 lb | $63.10 | — |
| 2019 | 1b | Santa Rosa | 90.57 | Honey | 264.55 lb | $64.00 | — |
| 2022 | 2a | Santa Rosa | 90.36 | Natural honey | 264.60 lb | $18.10 | — |
| 2022 | 2b | Santa Rosa | 90.36 | Natural honey | 219.80 lb | $16.80 | — |
| 2022 | 9 | Las Duanas | 88.79 | Natural | 286.00 lb | $25.80 | — |
| 2025 | 1a (Washed + Honey) | Santa Rosa | 90.93 | Honey | 199.50 lb | $41.20 | $8,219.40 |
| 2025 | 1b (Washed + Honey) | Santa Rosa | 90.93 | Honey | 199.50 lb | $42.10 | $8,398.95 |
Sources, all accessed 2026-07-23 and confirmed via WebFetch: ACE — El Salvador 2014, 2017 farm directory and 2017 farm directory, second lot, ACE — El Salvador 2019, ACE — El Salvador 2022, ACE — El Salvador 2025. Every lot in the table is Pacamara, and every lot is from the Alotepec-Metapán growing region except the 2014 entry, which the archive lists by municipality as San Ignacio, Chalatenango. Where a year shows an “a” and a “b” row, that is one coffee split into two auction lots that sold separately to different buyers. Dashes mark figures the relevant ACE page does not publish, not figures of zero.
Two things stand out. The first is consistency across eleven years and four different juries — 91.41, 91.28, 90.57, 90.36, 90.93, from the same block of the same variety, put through the same processing method. That is very hard to do by luck. The second is the price collapse without a matching score collapse: 91.28 points fetched 41.20/lb in 2025. Score is not price. What moved was the auction, not the coffee. See Premiumisation for why those top-lot numbers swing so far.
By 2025 the lots had also shrunk: 199.50 lb per lot, against 330–374 lb in 2017. A Cup of Excellence lot has to clear a minimum size to be entered at all, so the winning block is producing near the floor.
Who buys it
The buyer lists read as a map of the specialty coffee auction circuit, and Japan is on nearly every line. Maruyama Coffee took part in the top lots of both 2017 and 2019; Sarutahiko Coffee, Toa Coffee, Pon Pon Coffee, itoya coffee, Saza Coffee, Wataru (buying for Rokumei Coffee), Mesh Coffee of Korea and Difference Coffee Co of the UK appear across the two years. In 2022 the lots went to Terarosa in Korea and Caffè Pascucci in Italy; in 2025 to CHG, Boquerón Coffee, S.O.E Coffee and Huracán Coffee (same ACE pages).
Several of those 2017 lots were bought by groups rather than single roasters — see Buying consortium for why that happens at both ends of an auction’s price range.
Honey processing is the through-line
Honey means the skin of the cherry is stripped off but the sticky fruit layer underneath is left on the bean while it dries, so sugars from the fruit stay in contact with the seed. It sits between the fully-scrubbed washed method and the whole-fruit natural one.
ACE’s farm page ties the 2014 win directly to it: the first-place lot 2 was honey processed, and the family’s own account is that the method “improved all the qualitative attributes of the coffee” (ACE farm directory, second 2017 lot, accessed 2026-07-23). Every subsequent placement in the table above is honey or natural honey — a longer, fruitier version of the same idea. The published cupping notes for the 2017 lots run to butter, brown sugar, caramel, honey, sugar cane and red apple, with orange and grapefruit acidity (same source), which is very much what honey processing at altitude is expected to give.
Pacamara is the other half of the formula: a Salvadoran laboratory cross with, in World Coffee Research’s rating, exceptional quality potential and almost no disease resistance, which pays off only at the altitudes where it is sickest. Santa Rosa sits at roughly 1,550 m.
To verify
La Palma or San Ignacio. ACE’s farm-directory page gives Santa Rosa’s location as San Ignacio, Chalatenango, and the 2014 archive lists the winning lot the same way (ACE farm directory; ACE — El Salvador 2014, both accessed 2026-07-23). This note’s research brief places the farm in La Palma, Chalatenango instead. The two are neighbouring municipalities in the same northern strip and the results tables use the regional name Alotepec-Metapán for both, so this is most likely a boundary or address ambiguity rather than a real disagreement — but San Ignacio is what the primary record says.
To verify
Altitude figures disagree by 50–100 m. ACE’s farm-directory page states a single altitude of 1,550 m. The research brief for this note reports lot 1 at 1,600 m (highest point, most sun) and lot 2 at 1,500 m — lot 2 being the 2014 winner — attributed to the same ACE profile. The WebFetch of that page returned only the single 1,550 m figure. The per-lot altitudes may come from a fuller version of the ACE text, but they are not confirmed here.
To verify
Most of the placement history is from one blog. A single secondary write-up (Coffee Beans KSA, cited via the research report only) lists further Santa Rosa placements: 5th in 2011 (90.69), 20th in 2013 (85.77), 12th in 2014 (86.97), 8th in 2015 (88.32), 3rd in 2018 (90.57), 10th in 2020 (88.5) and 12th in 2021 (88.5). None of these was checked against an ACE results page here, and the same source gives the 2019 score as 90.6 where ACE’s own table says 90.57. Treat the unchecked rows as claims, not record.
To verify
Farm size and biography. ACE’s page is paraphrased as describing 800 hectares of land with 30 hectares in coffee, the purchase of Santa Rosa around 1993, a decade of university teaching, and the replant “with the explicit goal of winning the Cup of Excellence” in 2002 or 2003 (the two ACE pages give both years). All of it rests on one organisation’s farm profile, retrieved as a summary; no land registry, census or news source was consulted. The 800 ha figure in particular is large enough to want a second source.
Related
- Pacamara — the variety every one of his winning lots is made of, and the one this wiki already documents as dominating El Salvador’s competition
- Cup of Excellence — the competition the farm was replanted to win
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — the body that runs it and publishes every figure above
- Cup of Excellence records by country — where El Salvador’s auction sits against the rest
- Honey process · Natural process · Washed process — the three processing routes, and the one the family bet on
- Coffee scoring · Cupping — what a 91.28 is and how a jury arrives at it
- Premiumisation — why the same farm’s price per pound fell by more than half while its score barely moved
- Buying consortium — why several roasters split his top lots
- Saza Coffee — the Japanese roaster in the 2017 winning group
- Ramón Jarquín · Basha Bekele — the other producers in this wiki whose story is told through a single auction table
- World Coffee Research — the source of Pacamara’s agronomic record
Official links
- (no official website found — neither Jorge Raúl Rivera nor the family company J. Raul Rivera, S.A. de C.V. has a web presence in any source consulted here; the farm is documented only through the competition organiser)
- Official record — ACE farm directory, Santa Rosa 2017 (lot 1a)
- Official record — ACE farm directory, Santa Rosa 2017 (lot 1b)
- Official results — Alliance for Coffee Excellence, competition and auction archive
Sources
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory, Santa Rosa 2017 (91.28, lot 1a) — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — farm directory, Santa Rosa 2017 (91.28, lot 1b) — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2014 results — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2019 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2022 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Cup of Excellence El Salvador 2025 results and auction — accessed 2026-07-23 (confirmed via WebFetch)
- Alliance for Coffee Excellence — competition and auction results archive — accessed 2026-07-23
- Global Coffee Report — Cup of Excellence El Salvador sees 25 coffees head to auction — accessed 2026-07-23 (returned HTTP 403; cited via the research report only, and its 2019 figures are superseded by ACE’s own table above)
- Coffee Beans KSA — The Journey of Excellence from the Depths of El Salvador’s Mountains — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report only; single-source placement history, flagged above)